classic of mountains

the first thing I ever made in twine was a system that would generate descriptions of mythic landscapes, modelled after the shan hai jing or classic of mountains and seas, a classical chinese geographical text and bestiary. as you moved across a chain of mountains, the game randomly generated the name of the mountain, its geography, what grew there, and what magical animals inhabited it.

when I had some free time earlier this year i returned to my generator and cleaned up the code, playable here.

i still sometimes add words to the program now and them. it doesn’t have any particularly clever or novel systems, but i think it shows you don’t necessarily have to be clever or novel to generate interesting text fragments.